Serving personnel in restaurants, such as waiters and waitresses, are often required to serve very hot or cold food simultaneously to several customers. The serving personnel may do less walking and reduce customer waiting time by carrying several dishes at one time, carrying some of the dishes on their arms. The dishes carried are often hot, and burned arms frequently result.
Arm protective gloves, or gauntlets, have long been known. R. W. Peakes, U.S. Pat. No. 2,304,137 discloses a glove with an arm protective portion, a protective inner liner, and an outer glove. D. M. Sheridan, U.S. Pat. No. Des. 258,625 discloses a design for a heat protective arm and hand glove for hot food service. The Sheridan disclosure shows a glove of the kind that has separated thumb and first finger portions, and an extended portion for covering an arm.
Gloves such as those disclosed in Sheridan, while they may be of some use in protecting arms of restaurant service personnel from burns, may be inconvenient to use in restaurants because dishes and trays may readily slip off of the surface of the gloves, particularly from the extended arm-covering portions. Also, such gloves are designed to fit only a right or a left hand, and may accordingly be inconvenient to use because they cannot be easily transferred from one hand to another.
Ambidextrous hot-server mittens are also known. One such mitten, which is available from R. A. Briggs & Co., Lake Zurich, IL 60047 and Cannon, Cannon, NY 10020, comprises a mitt portion which provides a single pocket for enclosing the four fingers of a hand, engaged to a thumb-containing opposed enclosure. The mitt portion extends just above the wrist of an adult human hand, and the entire mitten, except for the rear side, that is the side covering the back of the hand, is protected by a heat-protective inner liner.
It would be desirable to have a heat-protective arm and hand glove, suitable for use in serving hot foods, which is ambidextrous, and which is not subject to the inconvenience of having plates and the like readily slip off.